Iraqi Insurgents Once Mounted Rockets on Their Heads

Iraq’s insurgents made all sorts of homemade weapons in their seven-year tangle with the U.S. military. Some enterprising militants home-brewed their own rocket launchers — and some even mounted them on their heads.

That’s what Matt Schroeder learned from a recent Freedom of Information Act request he filed. A weapons researcher with the Federation of American Scientists, Schroeder was at work on a joint project into illicit weaponry with the Small Arms Survey when he heard rumors of Iraqi insurgents putting together rocket launchers using spare parts. The last thing he expected to see was a Russian air-to-ground rocket getting fired off someone’s head using “tape and a plexiglass visor,” Schroeder says.

The previously unseen photo Schroeder received from the Army in January isn’t dated, but Schroeder believes it’s from around 2009 or maybe a little earlier. It came from a report on a captured weapons cache that showed Iraqi insurgents using the Russian S-5k 57-millimeter rocket, usually fired from an aircraft rocket pod on unfortunate people below. The Iraqis attempted to turn it into a shoulder-fired rocket, probably after looting it from the stockpiles of the Saddam-era army.

Improvised rocket launchers had already showed up in Chechen rebel attacks on Russian forces. But those showed a “welded design with good durability,” according to the Army report Schroeder acquired and shared with Danger Room. The Iraqi designs weren’t as sophisticated: They would often be one to four metal barrels, about as long as an M4 rifle, strapped together with a metal band or a weld, powered by a 9-volt battery, and mounted on a couple of pieces of spare plywood that provided a grip. One, er, unique design, shows makeshift, shoulder-mounted harness that mounted four rocket barrels above the artilleryman’s head and protected his face with a piece of plexiglass.

“We heard a lot about improvised rocket launchers, but we didn’t hear about this,” Schroeder said. “Maybe that’s because it didn’t have a tactical impact.”

Perhaps insurgents decided letting off a rocket above their heads wasn’t the smartest idea. They had more luck shooting off rockets from tubes welded to the underside of a wheelbarrow. And the accuracy of any such improvised rocket launcher is questionable at best.

But Iraq wouldn’t be the last place improvised rocket launchers have showed up. Insurgents in Libya fighting Moammar Gadhafi last year welded together their own using scrap metal, a bit of wood and a few wires, as C.J. Chivers has reported for The New York Times, again for 57-millimeter rockets. And the video above shows Syrian rebels doing much the same thing. (Here’s another video showing them using a three-barrel variation.)

“Insurgents will work with what they have, and often get quite creative,” Schroeder observes. “Creative” is certainly one way to describe wearing a rocket launcher on your head.